Guest Thinkers

The U.S. should follow Britain’s lead in tackling child poverty, says Charles Blow. A new method is urgently needed to stem the tide of children falling into a life of scarcity and want.

Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend. New statistics show that after the doldrums of middle-age, life perks up again.

Happy holidays! Every year as I range across the web in search of news and ideas I come across a few articles that stand out as exceptionally worth reading. Today […]

Over half the world’s population lives in cities, with millions more pouring in every year. Countries like China, India and South Korea are investing heavily in new so-called “smart cities” […]

Ryan Chin, of MIT’s Smart Cities group writes that while Mitchell was perhaps the world’s leading urban theorist, he was also a great mentor and advocate for students.

The key to understanding the enduring relevance of the speech is to focus on what Ike actually said and to understand what motivated the general for much of his adult lifetime.

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the caliber of their scholarship, says Simon Head.

It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the academic Richard Dawkins and the essayist Christopher Hitchens, believers have hit back.

The Mexican government has been using the army to fight the nation’s drug cartels for about four years. It isn’t working. Some critics say the army is part of the problem.

Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is “really out there” or an accident, […]

Last month, we looked at Meltware – an ingenious line of DIY tableware made out of palm tree wax. Now, a similar and even more playful project is applying the same […]

Like Satan, he is known by many names—Sinterklaas, Père Noël, Tomte—but we Americans call him Santa Claus. The long white beard, red outfit, reindeer, etc., all seem like givens to […]

Homelessness is perhaps the most disconcerting reminder of the staggering gap between the rich and the poor in some of the world’s wealthiest nations. In Detroit alone, more than 18,000 […]

2010 was the year good old-fashioned, blame-it-on-the-breeding-masses overpopulation theory re-entered the mainstream. There’s just too many Malthusians, says Tim Black.

Influencers are what makes the greentech industry world go round, so here are the 10 individuals that have had the biggest effect on the greentech sector this year.

When 71 senators to voted to ratify New START it was a huge victory for Obama and the Democrats. The vote would normally have been a victory for Republicans. The […]

Amanda Marcotte has a brilliant essay in Slate on the rape allegations against Julian Assange and the Catch-22 of why more victims don’t come forward. We’re bombarded with erroneous stereotypes […]

We all know that Yemen has serious problems that are not limited to just AQAP.  But there have also been a few bright spots in recent months. Topping the list […]

Against all odds and predictions the Food Safety and Modernization Act passed Congress this week. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, the first major overhaul of the country’s […]

Today Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who does an excellent job making complicated legal stories understandable, has a piece on the latest bit of Guantanamo Bay news.  According […]

The Christmas season should be a lot less long. We should do more, if not all, of our carol singing, partying, giving, and such between Christmas and Epiphany.

“2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem.” As reflections on the WikiLeaks saga turn into prognosticating about the future of cyber-security, so […]

Afters months of waiting, I have finally been able to get my act together enough to post the answers to questions you posed to Dr. Adam Kent. If you remember […]

Well, we’ve reached the holidays again, so Eruptions will be heading off on its annual Holiday break. After this rather busy semester – academically, professionally and volcanically – I need […]

Haley Barbour has obviously forgotten that running for the presidency of the United States is not the same as running for the presidency of the Yazoo City Country Club. Barbour […]

A website will analyze your emails and chats and estimate how well you are in sync with your partner, frenemy or whoever.

What do you get for the child in your life? That’s the big question for so many people around this time of year. If I can make a suggestion for […]

Tis the season for lists, and Attorney General Eric Holder has one and Anwar al-Awlaki is on it.  Speaking to ABC television, Holder said that al-Awlaki was on the same […]

It’s long been speculated that the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, has large volcanoes made of ice. In 2005, it was thought that one of these ice volcanoes had been […]

It’s the season for highlighting the best that was written, said, and done in 2010.  The consensus is emerging that the most thoughtful TV show (and so the one that […]